The Reason
In the panegyric on the greatness of man, in “Hamlet,” already quoted, the dramatist exclaims first, ‘’ How noble in reason!” and reason is man’s prime dignity. It is the mark by which he is specially distinguished from the inferior animals. It is the means by which he rules over the other creatures and subdues the earth to his will and purposes. It is by the development of the reason, or intellect, or mind — for these are all names for the same faculty — that one race of mankind outstrips another in the path of progress; and the degree in which this faculty is possessed is the accepted measure of greatness between man and man. The cultivation of the reason must, therefore, be an object of sacred ambition for all who covet a lofty or well developed humanity.
What is the work of the reason?
The reason may, in its highest form of activity, (167)
be described as the faculty by which from things already known we advance to conclusions which these imply but which, till the act of reasoning is performed, are unknown. Thus there resides in the reason, as well as in the imagination, a kind of creative power; for out of the facts lodged in the mind through the faculties of observation it educes thoughts which are new and of its own invention. Of this an inkling may be discerned in the exaltation with which a successful piece of reasoning is completed by one’s own mental faculties or even listened to from another’s lips. A touch of this self-satisfaction is felt even by the schoolboy as he sees that the sum at which he is working is coming right; and by every housewife, at her accounts, when the two sides exactly balance. At the close of the evidence submitted during a prolonged trial in a court-of-law the facts to which the jury have listened may form a confused mass of isolated statements, apparently pointing in no particular direction; but an able advocate, rising, takes hold of them and, separating part from part and laying this thing and that together, compels the jury to recognise that in the facts to which they have been listening there is a certain conclusion involved, which emerges as clearly as a point of light. The entire science of mathematics is deduced from a few axioms, with which it begins; to these an uninstructed mind would assent without perceiving anything which they imply; but the educated reason can trace out the conclusions, one after another, until there arises, out of little or nothing, a vast and noble structure of demonstrative truth. Thus, the reason, bringing its force to bear on the raw materials of knowledge supplied by the lower faculties, infers from them a more advanced and lofty knowledge of its own.
A humbler way of describing the reason is to call it the faculty of comparison or of relation. By the lower faculties the materials of thought are brought into the mind singly and apart; but the reason combines them; it observes those which are like one another and gathers these into groups, while it separates the unlike. So multitudinous are the objects presented to observation in nature and in history that, if the mind had to deal with them one by one, it would be hopelessly confused, and movement would be impossible; but the reason enables it to reduce this multiplicity to manageable proportions by gathering them into bundles. Thus, for example, nature presents to the mind numerous objects.
no two of which are in all respects alike, but the reason, comparing them, perceives that in certain respects they are all alike, and accordingly it puts them in one bundle which it labels “flowers”; and then, instead of attending to each of these objects by itself, it can, when it finds it desirable, think of millions of them under this one conception. The mind is constantly forming such groups by comparing and contrasting the objects brought under its notice. Sometimes it includes a group under a wider one, as when Europeans are known to be Aryans; sometimes it breaks up a group into smaller ones, as when a boy learns to distinguish his books into poetry and prose; and constantly has the mind to be deciding to which group every new object coming within its ken has to be referred. As a rule this is easy; yet it may be the reverse; and not seldom may mistakes be made. Thus, many a person is astonished to learn that a whale is not a fish, or that a sponge is not a plant. When a prisoner is at the bar, it has to be determined whether he is to be placed in the group of Guilty or that of Not-guilty; but everyone is aware that to do so may be far from easy: it may require the leading of much evidence and the presentation of a lengthy argutiient; and, when all is done, the conclusion may be less clear than could be desired.
The relations between one thing and another by which such classification is regulated may be of many dififerent kinds; but it is the function of the reason to detect these, whatever they may be.
Thus, some things are related to one another as means and ends. Something requires to be done; but how? To find this out is the province of reason. It has to calculate and to experiment, until it has discovered the means for accomplishing the end contemplated. Thus, the general sent to reduce a territory or to capture a fortress has to pick the requisite number of troops, to provide these with arms and ammunition, to accumulate stores of every description, to determine the routes, to devise the mode of attack, and to do a hundred other things, all of which are the work of the reason. The engineer to whom is submitted the problem of propelling a ship of a certain size and weight at a certain rate has, in like manner, to calculate the type of engine requisite, to test the strength of materials, and forecast the effects of lines and curves; and in this adaptation of the means to the end it is the reason which is at work from point to point.
The statesman has the welfare of the country committed to his charge, but he will fail of his task, and it will not be long before his place must be taken by someone else, unless his intellect be continually exercised in devising new improvements and removing old hindrances. In short, a very large proportion of the work of human beings, from the highest paths of activity down to the humblest, may be described as the exercise of the reason in the way of adapting means to ends.
Another kind of connexion between objects with which the reason has to do is that of cause and effect. Not infrequently the problems offered to the reason from this quarter are closely related to those just described. For example, when a doctor is called in, because a patient is suffering pain, he has first to set his brain to work to discover what is the origin of the disturbance — this is a question of cause and effect — and then he has to apply his mind to determine by what specifics the disorder can be removed — this is a question of means and ends. This world, as soon as we open our eyes upon it, is seen to be full of phenomena into the causes of which the mind is impelled to inquire. Why do day and night succeed each other so regularly? why do the four seasons divide the year amongst them? why does it rain? why does the wind blow? why does the tide rise and fall? ^’ Why “is a great word of the reason; and its twin-word is “Because”: whenever either of these is made use of, the reason is at work. There have been parts of the world, indeed, and there have been epochs of history, in which little use of such words has been made; but, in the present century and in the countries of civilisation, there is awake in the minds of men an insatiable curiosity; things that had for centuries been taken for granted have been called in question; every feature of nature has given rise to inquiry, and the answers have been made the occasion for deeper investigations. The result of all this mental travail is the fabric of modern science, which is the answer, as far as it has yet been possible to give it, to the queries of the intellect. Not only, however, can the mind thus reason from the phenomena which it sees back to the causes by which these have been produced, but it can also turn the problem the other way and ask, ‘’ Such-and-such conditions being given, what will be the consequences “? If gunpowder and fire were brought into contact, we know what would ensue; if a living animal were thrown into the water and could not swim, we know that it would be drowned. But, though the answers to such simple questions are notorious, there are problems arising every day to which the answers cannot yet be given even by the wisest; and there are others for the solution of which the widest survey is requisite of which the human faculties are capable. But this is one of the most important functions of reason — to forecast what the results will be of certain modes of action.
Such are some of the relations of which the reason has to take cognisance. But it can hardly be much engaged in this work without the question arising, how these connexions between things have been formed. When, for example, certain of the objects perceived in nature are separated from the rest and called flowers, is this a division only formed by the human mind for its own convenience, or does it exist in nature itself? and, if so, how did it come there? One of the greatest triumphs of the reason has been the discovery of what are called the laws of nature. There is, for example, the law of gravitation. First formulated, in the mind of Newton, to explain very simple phenomena, it was subsequently applied by him and by others to explain the entire system of the physical universe and the motions of the bodies with which space is peopled But how do the motions of all physical things in heaven and earth happen to be regulated by this law? As the human mind arranges the objects of its knowledge, it finds that it is not proceeding arbitrarily: the order is there already in the very framework of nature, and all that the human mind has to do is to find it out. Thus, the path of thought goes along deep lines which have been fixed in the constitution of the world before man arrived. The universe, in short, is a creation of intelligence. It is moral also; for, in reasoning from antecedent to consequent, the mind discovers that certain kinds of action lead to happiness, while others lead to misery. The stars in their courses fight on the side of righteousness and against iniquity. At the back of nature, therefore, there is a somewhat — must it not be a Someone? — who has impressed on it the order which it is the glory of the human mind to trace out and who, therefore, must be wise. And not only is all orderly, but all is ordered with a view to righteousness; and, therefore, its Author must be good.^
1 Of all the achievements of modern philosophy perhaps the most remarkable is that of Kant, who, in his doctrine of
The above is a faint outline of the functions
the Categories, proved that in the mind, as, it comes into the world, there is a system of pigeonholes, by which the process of classifying the objects presented in sense is facilitated, and so the multitudinous and confused presentations of sense are worked up into experience. Just as in the body, at its birth, there are orifices and receptacles of various kinds, through which the impressions of external things are conveyed to the mind from the outside, so in the mind itself there is machinery provided for dealing with these masses of sensation, separating them into like and unlike and thus enabling them to be unified into knowledge; for the mere reception of sensations is not knowledge: knowledge is a manufactured article, consisting of. the sensations after they have passed through this internal machine. Time and space, Kant early saw, form part of this mental apparatus; but - he subsequently discovered that the means of working out the entire structure’ of which he was in search had been provided, many hundreds of years before his own thinking began, in the Logic of the Greek philosophy. The ancient logicians had arrived at the doctrine that all judgments are of four species — those of quantity, quality, relation and modality — and Kant, laying hold of this suggestion, worked out twelve categories, by means of which the mind is always performing the separating and unifying operations in which it is engaged. These categories are not .themselves, properly speaking, knowledge; knowledge comes through the senses; but they are the indispensable forms through which the sensations must pass before they are worked up into knowledge. It is one of the wonders of history that the doctrines of logic were so early perfected; it fills one with the same astonishment at the power of the human mind as is produced by the early perfection of mathematics; and this use by Kant of the labours of his ancient of reason. A word may now be said about its cultivation.
This valuable faculty is distributed among the members of the human species in very varying degrees. Those fitted by nature to take the foremost places among their fellow-creatures are all generously endowed with it, while, at the opposite extreme, there are multitudes whose ideas are habitually vague and feeble. Even among those who have received the gift in a liberal degree, however, reason exists in different forms, some of which are more and some less conscious. In the less conscious forms it obtains such names as Tact and Commonsense. In women of the abler class there is frequently little capacity for formal argument, but there is an insight by which motive is penetrated and character judged with almost infallible accuracy, and in practical matters there is a power of choosing the proper instrument and going straight to the mark which the formal thinker toils after in vain. In the same
predecessors is so convincing that it is difi&cult for anyone who has really grasped the significance of the Categories ever to be satisfied with a view of mental science which attributes everything to matter and sense, without recognising the marvellous structure of the mind itself. Matter and sense, indeed, contribute the material, and mind only the form; but form makes all the difference between chaos and cosmos.
17B CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
way persons of the opposite sex strongly endowed with commonsense reach just judgments in difficult cases by shortcuts, which they would themselves be unable to explain; and they have frequently the power of compressing into brief and luminous sayings the results of a lifetime of experience. When the Forth Bridge was in process of construction, I once had the privilege of spending an afternoon in the company of one of the principal engineers, who told me that, in the carrying out of that gigantic undertaking, many new and surprising difficulties had to be surmounted. On the solution of these the highest trained skill which money could purchase was brought to bear; yet most of them were solved by one man, who had had no College training and possessed little mathematical knowledge, but was full of a kind of genius which, without conscious rules, could always find some way out of a difficulty. ‘’ Set him down,” said my informant, “before any difficulty whatever, and he will come out of it somehow at the other side.” The man was Sir William Arrol, whose earthly career has since terminated, and whose memoir has recently been given to the world.
Commonsense is generally considered to be a gift which, unless it has been bestowed by hature, cannot be acquired at all. What amount of truth there may be in this popular impression need not be discussed here; but at all events, in certain of its forms, the reason is a faculty extremely susceptible of education; and it may be worth while to mention some of the ways in which it may be cultivated.
The science of logic has for its aim to put into forms visible to the eye all the processes through which reasoning passes, whether the mind be conscious of its own operations or not; it also exhibits all kinds of fallacious arguments in such a way as to demonstrate their absurdity; and there can be no question that the study of this science has a practical value in enabling the mind to reason correctly.^ Mathematical science
1 The science of logic has to do with three processes — conception, judgment and reasoning — and an attempt has been made in the text to give some general notion of what these are. But perhaps more space should have been taken to explain at least the third — reasoning, both inductive and deductive. Only, if such technicalities were admitted at all, it would be difficult to know where to stop. The ordinary man is not aware that the workings of his own mind can all be reduced to the simple forms of logic, or that the most stupendous structures of thought put together by the mind of man, such as the abstract sciences, can all be taken asunder and exhibited as illustrations of the same processes. Hence, where real mental curiosity exists, a slight acquaintance with the laws of thought may be found anything but dry.
being from beginning to end a pure effort of the reason, its pursuit is an excellent discipline for this faculty. The same tonic influence is exerted by grammar — one of the most valuable elements in elementary education. He who wishes to strengthen this faculty in himself ought to accustom himself to sequestered and prolonged meditation on important themes; for practice here, as elsewhere, makes perfect; and he ought to accustom himself to such reading and study as will put a strain on the attention. At the present time many even of those possessed of intellectual tastes are spoiling their minds by the scrappiness and discursiveness of their reading. In an autobiographical work the Duke of Argyll before the last, who deserved well of his country by the perseverance with which for a lifetime he moved, in the eyes of the public, on the higher levels of thought, mentioned the influence exerted on his own faculties* by the practice of certain mechanical arts, which his father had him taught. Love, he remarked, of accurate workmanship — of absolutely smooth surfaces made by the plane and of joinings where the edges absolutely met — with a dislike and disdain of slovenliness in such respects, strengthened the mental powers. There can be no doubt that this observation is just.
To habits of accuracy and perfection in doing whatever the hand finds to do — the habit of making one’s job as clean and complete as it can be made — belongs the virtue of exerting a most invigorating influence on the intellect; and here mental culture and moral culture are one.
The religious use of the reason has already been hinted at. God might almost be said to be a product of the reason; at all events He is its discovery. In what way the reason apprehends Him is, indeed, a subject of hot controversy; but that, in some way, we rise from “things which do appear” to the Author from whom these proceed is certain; and this is by far the sublimest flight of this faculty. On the objects of the creation the marks of the Deity are imprinted, and similar marks of Him are reproduced day after day before the eyes of men in the evolution of history. From these the reasoning mind infers God’s various attributes — “His eternal power and godhead” — and there can be no nobler occupation for the reason than to piece together such indications into a consistent and impressive view of what God is, and so vindicate the divine existence and character against the objections of unbelief.
In a well known passage of the Old Testament, Jehovah says to His people, ‘’ Come now and let us reason together “; and, all through the writings of the prophets, one of the commonest complaints is, that those who have had the best opportunities of apprehending the Divine Being do not make use of their reasoning powers — ‘* My people do not know, Israel doth not consider “. Everywhere in the Scripture it is taken for granted that, if human beings would only think, they would worship and obey. One of the commonest names for sin, on the contrary, is “folly” or ‘* unreason “. In the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament, in which not only wisdom but folly also is discussed, the fundamental idea is, that He who has created this world and appointed man to inhabit it has laid down, in the very substance of things, the rails on which human lives must move forward, if they are to reach happiness here and blessedness hereafter. Therefore, to find out what these lines are and to keep life running forward on them is the predestined work of reason. But, if, when God says, ‘’ You must move in this direction if you wish to be happy,” anyone is moving in the opposite direction and yet expecting to be happy, then this person is a fool; for the end of these things is death.
It has often occurred to me that, if even a person of abandoned character could be got to sit down and consider what the issues of his present conduct must be, and what would be the results of turning round to God, he could not fail to come to a right religious decision, so loudly would his own rational nature cry out to him to repent and believe.
God has not, however, left us to the light of reason alone: He has given to us a revelation of Himself in the Word and in Christ, by which we may far more clearly and fully learn both what He is and what is our own duty. This supplementary revelation is not, however, contradictory to that of nature; and the exercise of reason is requisite to comprehend its message and to incorporate this with the rest of knowledge. God’s Word is not given as a substitute for thought, but is fitted to widen and elevate our own thinking. There is in it, indeed, a marvellous simplicity, so that it can be comprehended and loved by the humblest; yet the most gifted are carried by it, if they will accept its aid, far above themselves, till they are able to apprehend things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard.
At the present day there is need to plead for an intelligent and reasonable faith; because religion is tending to sink into sentimentalism and sensationalism; and the majority of earnest people are so busy with practical undertakings that they have too little leisure to think. A generation ago it was different: one of the features of the religion of our fathers and grandfathers was grasp of principle combined with strength of conviction. They may have had less learning than we enjoy; but they knew the Bible, and its profound truths and overawing mysteries made thinkers of them. Facts are pouring in upon us from every quarter in bewildering numbers, and we read voraciously; but the accumulation of miscellaneous fragments of information is not thought: there is requisite a principle of unity, to combine our scattered knowledge into a whole; and this we shall seek most hopefully where our fathers found it — in the Word of God. With such a principle in hand, not only shall we comprehend this wonderful world in which we exist, but we shall see our own pathway clearly through it, to the better world to which we are travelling; for the growth of Christian intelligence has far more to do than it is usual at present to recognise with both depth of character and consistency of conduct.
The Reformation of the sixteenth century was, on one of its sides, a revival of reason. Before it arrived, the clergy had practically discontinued the function of preaching, the worship of the house of God being limited to a ceaseless round of forms and ceremonies. But, as soon as the dry bones had been moved, the awakened people began to cry out for the sustenance of the mind; and this was supplied to them in ample measure through the earnest and systematic preaching of the reformed clergy, while, in addition, the Bible was put into the hands of the common man, who proceeded to acquire for himself the power of reading, in order that he might learn, at first hand, the truth about the way of salvation. Very soon he had learned this so well that he was able to say whether or not the message delivered from the pulpit was in accordance with the sacred oracles. Ever since, preaching has been the distinctive feature of Protestant worship; and this involves the cultivation of the reason in both pulpit and pew. As a regular churchgoer listens from Sabbath to Sabbath to the lectures and sermons of a conscientious preacher, there gradually forms itself in his mind a view of the world — what the Germans call a Weltanschauung — inside of which all the most important objects coming within the scope of his experience are arranged into unity, and by which the conduct and the motives of both others and himself are judged. This view of his may be limited, and it may in some respects be mistaken; but there is no reason, but the reverse, why it should not be constantly expanding and constantly in process of correction. ‘’ Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?” But to possess such a Weltanschauung at all is a mark of distinction: it means that he who possesses it has passed out of the herd and joined the ranks of the thinkers — of those who not only live but know what they are living for. No occupation can be more honourable than to preach to minds of such calibre, however limited may be their education and however lowly their lot in life; and, if a preacher takes such hearers where he finds them and handles them with respect and sympathy, there is no intellectual height accessible to himself to which he will not find them able and willing to rise with him.
God Himself is the reason of the universe; and, by His stupendous works in nature and by the mystery of His providence, He has evoked from the mind of man in all ages its profoundest thoughts. There is every reason to believe that this will continue and increase, the better mankind becomes acquainted with the objects of creation in the distant heavens and with the processes of nature on the earth. In the Old Testament a David and an Isaiah touch the highest notes of sublimity when describing Him who sits on the circle of the heavens and counts the number of the stars. But a St. Paul in the New Testament finds so much deeper a wisdom in the process by which a righteous God is able to make sinners righteous that, when he contemplates it, he breaks out into the rhapsody, ‘’ O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past tracing out!” and a St. John, in similar fashion, finds the flight of his soaring mind at once stimulated and baffled by the mystery of how the Word was made flesh. However fast or far other knowledge may advance, the fact of redemption will always surpass for the individual every other earthly experience, and the hope of finding out how much it may mean for other beings in the distant places of creation is one of the reasons for which enlightened Christians covet immortality.